Posted by Jan on 7 Aug 2008
So you have targeted different countries for your campaigns to run in, but are still getting conversions from users outside of your targeted locations. Now what? Well, we recently had to go through a whole exercise to exclude a certain country from one of our campaigns…
Let’s look at an example that is just weird: If you are for instance targeting the US and the UK with your campaign, you would think that people browsing google.com or google.co.uk, regardless of where they are in the world, should not see your ads, unless they are actually in the US or UK, right? Wrong… You might have noticed that your ads will still appear on .co.uk, even if you’re browsing from SA, like me, but not on .com. It seems that for some reason Google will check your IP when browsing .com, but not when browsing .co.uk.
There are a few ways to get around this. You could move from location or country targeting, to custom or area targeting. For instance, you could turn off the actual country in your target list and then select the actual states in that country. This seems to work, but end up looking rather messy when you’re looking at your campaign setup. This functionality is not yet available for all countries either. The other option is to exclude ip ranges with the ip exclusion tool.
We are testing both options and will soon post our findings here.
